ALFRED THE GREAT

This biography of Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons (871-899), provides a dynamic new view of this important ruler. Alfred emerges from the pages of this biography as a great warlord, an effective and inventive ruler, and a passionate scholar whose piety and intellectual curiosity led him to sponsor a cultural and spiritual renaissance. Alfred’s victories on the battlefield and his sweeping administrative innovations not only preserved his native Wessex from viking conquest, but began the process of political consolidation that would culminate in the creation of the kingdom of England. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England strips away the varnish of later interpretations to recover the historical Alfred, pragmatic, generous, brutal, pious, scholarly within the context of his own age.